


Bravely, my diligence. Thou shalt be free.

by sageness



Category: due South
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superhero, Canon - TV, Community: ds_flashfiction, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-13
Updated: 2008-05-13
Packaged: 2017-10-03 18:31:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageness/pseuds/sageness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the blink of an eye, Fraser leapt the Sears Tower and caught the airliner that was careening out of control toward the lake.</p><p>"Constable! Constable!" cried the rescued passengers when they were safely disembarked on the emergency tarmac at O'Hare.</p><p>"Just doing my duty, ma'am," Fraser repeated over and over, until one young girl met his gaze and said, "If I get powers, I'm going to be just like you." Her small brow furrowed. "Except with a cooler uniform."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bravely, my diligence. Thou shalt be free.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the superpower challenge at ds_flashfiction. Thanks to china_shop for the wonderfully helpful beta. Title is from Shakespeare's Tempest (Act V, Sc. 1, in which Prospero is speaking to Ariel).

In the blink of an eye, Fraser leapt the Sears Tower and caught the airliner that was careening out of control toward the lake.

"Constable! Constable!" cried the rescued passengers when they were safely disembarked on the emergency tarmac at O'Hare.

"Just doing my duty, ma'am," Fraser repeated over and over, until one young girl met his gaze and said, "If I get powers, I'm going to be just like you." Her small brow furrowed. "Except with a cooler uniform."

Fraser's smile faltered slightly, but rallied at the promise shining in her eyes. "Right you are," he said, and then flew an evasive and speedy route home to Ray and the game on TV.

~\o/~

Rosalinda Vecchio, she knew people. She knew her kids thought she was born yesterday and needed shielding from certain truths, she knew her mother's dementia was worse than the doctors thought, and she knew her daughters were spoiled rotten by America. She knew, because in Napoli, fifty years ago, she woke up one day when she was twelve to the clamoring thoughts and dreams of her family. Her father in mid-nightmare about the war. Her mother's worry about the Communists. Her brother's bleary, half-waking flashback to losing his arm. Her sister's dream about lining her dolls up all in a row, over and over. The baby's dream of warmth-breast-comfort-milk.

She told no one.

A week later, an announcer on the radio said people were waking up with strange, unexplained powers. A girl could fly! A boy could walk through walls! It was happening all over the world and was all anyone was talking about. "What about the Armistice?" her father yelled, "What about the new government?" and did not see the wonder in it.

~\o/~

When Frannie Vecchio was a little girl, she wanted to be able to fly more than anything in the world. She wanted it so much that she begged her parents to take her to the carnival so she could fly high above Chicago for just a few minutes, held in the arms of one of the flying aeronauts, Larousse, Infantia, or Borealis.

For her tenth birthday, her wish finally came true, and it was the single best moment of her life. Better even than the day five years later when she discovered she could lift Pop's pool table with her pinkie toe.

Flight, _flight_ was freedom. This, though, this new thing bore the unwelcome stink of responsibility.

~\o/~

The first game Damien Kowalski taught his son was catch. As the years passed, Ray learned to play streetball with the neighbor kids, and he was always the one who could hit the ball farthest down the street. By the time he reached junior high, he could knock it over the fence. Coach thought he was a natural. Then Ray learned to drive—at the ripe old age of not-quite-fourteen—because his dad figured it would cheer him up after the bank thing.

It took about two minutes for Ray to be driving better than Damien.

"Perfect timing," the doctor said. "That's an unusual one."

Ray had to quit the school baseball team. He was banned from competitive sports for his unfair advantage, so he couldn't even hope to grow up to be the next Mario Andretti.

Stella, meanwhile...it turned out Stella could tell when anybody was lying, which Ray learned to much embarrassment when her power kicked in. They were freshmen in high school and at lunch one day, someone at the table wanted to hear the bank robbery story.

She didn't say anything as he tough-guy'd his way through it, but as soon as they were alone: "You mean you _weren't_ trying to distract him?" she said, all angry blue eyes and waist-length Cher-hair. "How could you let me go on thinking that?"

"What—wait, how—?"

"Guess who else has powers? As of yesterday morning. I would've told you sooner, but this is the first I've seen you."

"Great," he said dejectedly. He stared for a long time at the way his feet looked against the mottled school linoleum. Finally, in a gruff voice, he said, "I was scared, all right? He was huge and he _had_ you and I couldn't do anything to try to save you. And if anything ever happened to you—" He bit his tongue because he'd said way too much. It wasn't cool to tell a chick how you felt, not unless it was in a song or poem or something.

But Stella's mind worked fast. She wasn't looking hurt or mad anymore, and she didn't say 'Really?' or 'Are you serious?' If she could tell truth from lies, then now she _knew._ With a half-smile on her lips, she said, "I think you should ask me to the Fall Dance, Ray. If you want to, I mean."

Ray didn't freeze—he never did anymore. He took her hand. The big round mood ring she had on was deep blue. "Stella, can I take you to the dance?" He kissed her knuckles like the guys did in the old-fashioned movies she liked and looked up, hopefully.

She looked a little stunned, he thought, but happy. She nodded. "Yes," she said, "definitely."

~\o/~

Ray Vecchio remembered a time when he was two or three years old, when his Ma and Pop would roll back the rug in the living room, put a record on the turntable, and dance. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Johnny Mercer—they had a hundred records lined up on the shelf under the record player. Ray used to sit on the floor by the rolled up rug and clap his hands every time Pop twirled Ma. They looked like they were happy, or at least he believed they were, then, in hindsight.

But that was all before Maria came and before Pop had made enough money to buy the house and send for the family back in Italy. And it was long before the day Ray talked Sister Mary Michael into letting him retake his Geometry test instead of giving him the F he deserved.

It didn't work on anybody in his own family or who knew him very well. And when he tried it on Pop—to get him to stop drinking or to be nicer to Ma—all Ray got was a fat lip and a bruised eye.

He didn't get caught until he made the mistake of convincing Jimmy Burton to cram two whole sandwiches in his mouth at the lunch table, right in front of a nun.

"If he was dumb enough to get caught," Pop declared, "then he can take the Inhibitor implant and _like_ it." Inhibitors created a dampening field, not enough to kill a power entirely, but they gave Susceptibles a line of defense and made Normals able to shrug him off unless he gave the pitch everything he had—by which point anybody but the dumbest dumbo could tell he was up to no good.

The day Frannie got her powers and she showed him what she could do, Ray saw the bemused disappointment on her face and said, "Trade ya."

"Sure," she said, "you got it." Too bad wishes didn't work.

~\o/~

Harding Welsh would've traded his power, too, as a teenager, and in a heartbeat. X-ray vision was no fun at all, after the first day or two. Not in small-town Illinois, especially not once the local paper put it on the front page. The article even said, "Lock up your daughters and jewels," as if he were already guilty of perversion and theft. As if everyone didn't have the same basic equipment under their clothes and stuff in their homes anyhow.

Working the lake boats with his uncle got him out of town; moving to Chicago put him in the midst of _thousands _of people with powers. For the first time, Harding wasn't the village freak.

He had to appeal to the police commissioner to be let into the Academy. Every day someone drilled him on admissible evidence, and Harding respected that. It made him a better cop and probably, as much as anything, pushed him slowly up the ladder to lieutenant.

At his best, though, Harding was never as good as the Mountie. Fraser, apart from the host of the wild and bizarre that orbited him, was one of the best officers ever to grace the streets, and airspace, of the greater Chicago area. Which was only one reason Harding tried not to see too much when he looked in the direction of the supply closet. Or the men's room. It _was_ better now that Fraser and Kowalski had shacked up together, but for a while there, Harding lived in fear of the day Francesca went looking for a fresh box of paperclips at the wrong moment and alerted the whole station—and therefore the whole world—to the Super Mountie's precise relationship status. Harding could imagine the gouges in the walls, Fraser's vain protests, and Francesca's distress at chipping her nail polish on the brick.

Momentary comedy aside, such an event would have lightning bolts zapping out of Inspector Thatcher's eyeballs. And not because the Mountie was a Canadian national treasure.

Fraser and Kowalski walked past Harding's door in perfect step. A pink memo slip passed between them as they talked. A new lead, a new break in the case. They headed up the dusty stairwell to the roof, Harding saw, not down to the parking lot.

He leaned back in his office chair and focused through layers of brick, concrete, and furniture: on the roof, Fraser took a wide strap out of his belt pouch, wrapped it once around Kowalski, and fastened it to his Sam Browne. Then, with a grope Harding wished he hadn't seen, they were airborne, flying west into the sun.


End file.
